SOURCE: “Shakespeare and the End of Feudalism: King Lear as Fin-de-siècle Text,” in English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, Vol. 78, No. 6, November, 1997, pp. 513-21.

In the following essay, Zunder highlights Shakespeare's concern with the end of feudalism and the accession of James I.

Shakespeare probably wrote King Lear in the years immediately following the death of Elizabeth and the accession of James I in 1603; and the play evinces a strong sense of an ending. There is, for example, Gloucester's speech in Act I, Scene 2, after the disastrous division—or, rather, non-division (I.1.126-38)—of the kingdom, Lear's banishment of Cordelia, and Edgar's supposed plot against his father. It is a speech in which Shakespeare connects a discourse of contemporary history with the discourse of the play. It is delivered partly to Edmund on an otherwise empty stage and partly to the early seventeenth-century London...